Why You Should Hire People Who Have Failed

When Jeff Bezos started
AmazonFresh, he hired people who had failed at doing what he was
trying to do.David Ryder/Getty
Images

When it came time for Jeff Bezos to install a team to lead
Amazon’s new subsidiary, the grocery delivery service
AmazonFresh, he made a startling move. Instead of selecting
experts from the supermarket or delivery industries or snapping
up executives from his competitors, he chose people who had
failed exactly where he wanted to succeed.

This maneuver would have never happened in the early days of
Amazon. In the first few years of the company, Bezos was incredibly demanding about
who he would hire. He only wanted the best — which were people
who had “been successful in everything they had done.”

Bezos’s thinking on hiring did an about-face as he continued to
build Amazon. To hire innovators, you must move beyond
conventional ideas of success, and that’s why Bezos ultimately
hired failures to run AmazonFresh.

How to Rebound from Failure

Webvan was an online grocery delivery service
created during the first dot-com era that had raised $375 million
in funding, announced a plan to expand to 26 cities, and signed a
$1 billion contract to build high-tech warehouses, all before
figuring out a tenable business model.

Two years after they went public, they went bankrupt.

These days, companies like FreshDirect, Uber and Postmates have
found incredible success by doing the complete opposite. They get
profitable in a single city and then they scale from there. This
is what made Bezos’s hire even more surprising.

He hired former Webvan executives to run AmazonFresh, the very
people who had spent years running the company into the ground.
They hadn’t just failed but failed big. But it was because they’d
been so mistaken in their approach that they could also rebound
in a big way.

After running the business process team at Webvan, former
executive Mick Mountz “concluded that
the company’s downfall was due to the inflexibility of existing
material handling systems and the high cost of order
fulfillment.” That inspired Mountz “to create a better way to
pick, pack, and ship orders.” He took his learnings and founded Kiva Systems in 2003.
Amazon’s warehouse technology today is powered by Kiva, which
Amazon acquired in 2012 for $775 million.

When it comes to strategy today, the former Webvan execs running
AmazonFresh, including Mountz, decided to roll out AmazonFresh
slowly in Seattle before expanding. They’re making use of
Amazon’s warehouses rather than building their own. They bounced
back up from the Webvan failure with more lessons, experience,
knowledge, and will — and they’re putting it all to good use.

Why Failure Goes Hand in Hand with Innovation

What Bezos had to learn at Amazon is that “failure comes
part and parcel with invention.” Failure is an integral part
of the process of innovating and attempting what nobody else has
ever done before. If people haven’t failed before, it means
they’ve been playing it safe.

This flips the concept of success on its head, meaning you might
not want to recruit people with easy win after win on their
resumé.

For example, Google has changed how it has hired to move
away from the trappings of university prestige and test scores.
The company had previously been known to be somewhere almost
impossible to get a job without a Stanford or MIT degree and an
exemplary college GPA. They even asked about your SAT score.

But when they analyzed their data on what makes employees
successful, in true Google fashion, they found it had
nothing to do with scores or names. “Numbers and grades alone did
not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer used as
important hiring criteria,” explains Prasad Setty, vice president
for its people analytics team.

That gets at why former Yale professor William Deresiewicz calls
elite college students “excellent sheep.” They’re “anxious,
timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted
sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading
meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but
with no idea why they’re doing it.” They’re violently averse to
risk as a product of being shackled by their academic success.

What Google has instead found out, based on extensive surveys of
its work force and performance data, is that its most innovative
workers “are those who have a strong sense of mission about their
work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.” They’re guided by their
own curiosity and sense of purpose, and as a result, they do
their best work.

We want the best and brightest to work with us, but the way to
hire innovators means looking past the traditional trappings of
success and looking at the boldness of someone’s trajectory.

Forget about pedigree and a C.V. glowing with only success.
Achievement isn’t about always being right or following the path
simply because others have trodden it before you.

Instead, hire people who’ve failed at doing something daring,
because they’re the only ones who’ll succeed at something bold.